Offere II
Our sourdough bread culture – which will be three years old in October – has travelled with us from Oxford to South Africa, Hull to London and formed the basis for khlebolsony rituals at multiple thresholds. It has accompanied us on this trip, and we bake bread again in Vilnius, adding Lithuanian flour (miltai) to the cultural mix.
We visit the Jewish cemetery in Obeliai, the shtetl where a lot of the Beinarts lived in the 19th century. The cemetery has graves going back perhaps 300 years, but stops in 1940 when the holocaust took place here. Some of the stones have recently been righted, but the site is very overgrown and has become a wildflower meadow in-between the graves. Our Dad, who has joined us for a week, attempts to decipher some of the graves, tracing the faded Yiddish words with his fingertip and trying to remember the hebrew alphabet. We soon realise that we are unlikely to find a Beinart grave without a translator and a thorough search.
The novella ‘It Has To Be This Way’ follows the story of an amnesiac preoccupied with old photographs. One of the characters says of the photographs: ‘They could not be indicative of memory, they were uncoupled from the past. Instead the photographs could only be memory in the making.’ I feel like the sites we visit have the same quality for us – there is no living history, no personal memories to connect us to these places, we do not feel their significance except through understanding them historically.
Katy and I bring our sourdough bread and Burgerspan salt to the cemetery. We make a performance in the graveyard, Offere II, meeting in front of the gravestones to share bread and salt – an echo of the film we made at the Salt Pans in South Africa. We don’t know for certain if this is where Woolf was born, but we bring an offering of salt from the place he is buried. These actions we perform are a form of memory in the making.
The traditional bread and salt ceremony marks the crossing of a threshold, often to a new home. But perhaps we are re-enacting this tradition in reverse: bringing with us the histories of lives that stemmed from this place but were lived out in an unimaginable future. A threshold between different timezones, different possible fates, diverging paths.
R Beinart
Ref: M. Anthony Penwill/Lindsay Seers, It Has To Be This Way. Matts Gallery 2010
